Planned Parenthood Doubles Down On Fake News

Leave it to the disreputable and embattled Planned Parenthood to keep a fake news story in the headlines as this week when in their #ScaryStats Halloween themed Twitter fest, they once again falsified the facts on abortion. The abortion mega vendor, long criticized for their racist founder Margaret Sanger and their tendency to put an abortion facility near people of color had this to say to Black Americans: “If you’re a Black woman in America, it’s statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth.” Can that be verified in the U.S.?

No. To quote the Oscar winning actress Marisa Tomei from her famous role in the movie “My Cousin Vinny,” it’s impossible to answer because it’s a trick question. No such comparison can be made because no such data exists.

Pregnancy data in the United States is treated like a medical event, and how women and their children, pre-born and born, experience it is tracked. Not so with abortion. No federal law compels abortionists to disclose what happens behind their closed doors. In fact, all we really know about abortion is what abortionists tell us.

Abortion data in the United States is produced by estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and from the abortion-industry think tank and apologist, the Guttmacher Institute. And some states, like California, in which one could expect high abortion numbers, report no data at all.

If you don’t believe pro-life advocates on that point, consider this at the CDC’s website: “The reporting areas provide this information voluntarily … This report summarizes abortion data for 2013 that were provided voluntarily to CDC by the central health agencies of 49 reporting areas (the District of Columbia; New York City; and 47 states, excluding California, Maryland, and New Hampshire).”

Patient surveys and other voluntary information are used by Guttmacher as they also note on their website and in reports like the “Population Group Abortion Rates and Lifetime Incidence of Abortion: United States, 2008–2014,” where researchers reported, “We used secondary data from the Abortion Patient Survey, the American Community Survey, and the National Survey of Family Growth to estimate abortion rates. We used information from the Abortion Patient Survey to estimate the lifetime incidence of abortion.”

This kind of blind faith in what the abortion industry tells us puts women at risk. We wouldn’t allow the banking industry to self-regulate, telling Americans, “Trust us, your money is safe.” Nor do we allow restaurants to serve anything they wish without inspection, saying “Trust us, your food is safe.” So why do we allow the abortion industry to tell us “Trust but DON’T verify” that deadly drugs and abortion surgeries end lives millions of times but without problems?

In fact, one of the co-founders of NARAL, the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who was personally responsible for 75,000 abortions himself, talked openly about the deceptions in abortion data … lies he helped make up and later disavowed.

We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of
statistics and figures. We succeeded [in breaking down the laws limiting
abortions] because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We
sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls
which indicated that 85% of the public favoured unrestricted abortion,
when we knew it was only 5%. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements
were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law.
(quoted in John Powell, Abortion: the silent Holocaust. Tabor, Allen,
Texas. 1981.)

These lies have particularly impacted the African-American community as many have noted, making Planned Parenthood’s tweet particularly offensive.

Also this week, a Democratic congressman called an African American woman “ignorant” as she tried to address how abortion is tearing up her community. Star Parker, founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and a community activist, went before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, to address a measure to limit abortion, noting, “Abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community today.”

Planned Parenthood’s own business model seems partly to blame. Life Issues Institute conducted a study in 2012, which revealed that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion clinics were located within walking distance of a Black or Hispanic neighborhood. Is it any surprise that the greedy abortion industry would push a message claiming a “safe” abortion to women close to their businesses?

Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger had this to say about minorities: “Minorities crammed into impoverished areas in inner cities should not be having so many babies. And, of course, these minorities (including most of America’s immigrants) are inferior in the human race, as are the physically and mentally handicapped. We should require mandatory sterilizations of those less desirable and promote easy access to abortion. And since sex should be a free-for-all, we must provide birth control and abortions to teenagers too. It’s all for the greater good and for a more intelligent, liberated, healthier population.”

The real #ScaryStat for Americans should be that Planned Parenthood continues to operate with more than half-a-billion in tax dollars and is still open for business hawking their deadly trade, uncaring about the women who are harmed and the 328,000+ lives they end every year. We need to hold Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry accountable with a national abortion reporting law, and we must redirect scarce taxpayer resources to real medical and pregnancy centers that serve women’s interests.

Kristan Hawkins (@KristanHawkins) is president of Students for Life of America.